Fallout sc-4 Read online

  Fisher opened the folder and skimmed the CCCD’s report. Finally, he looked up and said, “What in God’s name is PuH-19?”

  “Plutonium hydride-19,” Lambert answered. “It’s a negative hydrogen ion that attaches itself to Plutonium-239 that’s exposed to pure oxygen. Usually comes in the form of fine particulates — think of flour, but about a thousand times finer.”

  “Almost a gas,” Grimsdottir added. “It’s also pyrophoric, which is a fancy way of saying it’s an autoigniter. Its flash point is below room temperature; it’s also reactive to water or even humid air. In fact, it’s so touchy, the only safe way to handle it is in a pure nitrogen or argon atmosphere.”

  “Sounds lovely,” Fisher said. “Contagious?”

  “Not once it’s inside the body,” Grimsdottir replied. “The hydride particles settle in the tissues and organs and begin… dissolving them. Sorry, Sam, there’s really no other word for it.”

  “It’s okay. Where’s PuH-19 come from?”

  “Plutonium-based weapons production.”

  “Which is good news,” Lambert said. “It sharply narrows the list of where Peter picked it up.”

  Where, maybe, but not how, Fisher thought. After ten years as a Justice Department investigator, Peter had resigned in protest during Gonzales-gate and gone into business for himself as a security consultant. While certain Peter had an inkling of what Fisher did for a living, they’d never discussed it, and neither did they discuss the specifics of Peter’s business. Fisher had long suspected the nature of their work was similar.

  “What else?” Fisher said.

  Grimsdottir said, “It’s about a hundred times deadlier than plutonium. A speck of PuH-19 the size of a head of a pencil is enough to kill a room full of people — which is why its production and storage has been banned by all countries of the world save two: Russia and the United States.”

  Fisher closed the file and slowly slid it back across the table to Grimsdottir. He looked at Lambert and said, “We need to talk.”

  Anna took the hint and excused herself. When the door clicked shut, Fisher said, “I’m going to need a leave of absence or—”

  “Now, Sam, hold on a second—”

  “Or, if you’d prefer, I’ll have my letter of resignation on your desk by—”

  “Not necessary.”

  “Colonel, I’m going to find whoever did this to Peter.”

  “I know.”

  “And break a lot of laws doing it.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “And when I find them, I’m going to kill each and every one of them.”

  Lambert laid a hand on Fisher’s forearm. “Stop. Take a breath. I mean it, Sam, take a breath.”

  Fisher took a breath.

  “While you were in the air with Peter’s body, I was at Langley,” Lambert said. “We’ve got the green light from both the DCI and the NID.” The director of central intelligence at the CIA and the national intelligence director — the president’s intelligence czar. “The mission’s ours. Find where and how Peter was infected, track it back to its source, and find out if there’s more out there. A coffee cup full of PuH- 19 could kill every living thing in New York City. Believe me, we’ve got a free hand on this.”

  “They know about my connection to Peter?”

  “Yep. It took some doing, but I convinced them you could stay objective. Can you?”

  “You have to ask?”

  “Normally, no, but there’s nothing normal about this. We need live, talking bodies, Sam, understood?”

  Fisher nodded. “Understood.”

  “You step outside the rules of engagement, and I’ll take you off this mission faster than you can blink.”

  “I hear you, Colonel.”

  “Good. Mission briefing in twenty. Anna’s got a lead for you.” Lambert stood up and started for the door. He stopped and turned around. “Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry about Peter.”

  7

  LA FONTAINE PARK, MONTREAL, CANADA

  Fisher refolded his copy of the Montreal Gazette to the Arts & Life page and shifted his eyes left, keeping his target in view. The man was a creature of habit, Fisher had found over the last two days. Same park, same bench, same sack lunch containing a baguette sandwich, an apple, and a pint bottle of milk. Keeping such a routine was a dangerous tendency for a private detective, but then again, Jerry Pults’s seeming laziness was Fisher’s gain.

  The park was abuzz with Montrealers flocking to one of the city’s many green spaces. With the last patches of snow gone and the tulips in bloom, spring had fully arrived, and the locals were taking advantage of it.

  At ninety acres and more than 125 years old, La Fontaine Park was not only one of the city’s largest green spaces but also one of its oldest. It reminded Fisher of New York’s Central Park, with enough hills, ponds, bike paths, playgrounds, tennis courts, and cafés that it had become one of Montreal’s default get-together spots. In the distance, over the tops of the trees, Fisher could see the row of Second Empire-style houses that lined Rue Sherbrooke.

  Pults, a former RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) detective, though ten years past retirement age, looked a lean and fit fifty years old — save one feature: a stiff left leg that he supported with a cane. Even so, Fisher wasn’t about to underestimate the man. Grimsdottir had worked her cyber magic and hacked into the RCMP’s personnel bureau database. Pults had had a long and distinguished career and had spent the last three years of it at the RCMP Academy in Regina, Saskatchewan, after a crackhead’s bullet had shattered his hip. He was thrice decorated for bravery, an expert marksman, and had for five years been the lead unarmed combat instructor at RCMP Toronto. On the personal side, Grimsdottir had found nothing damning; in fact, Pults and his wife, Mary, his high school sweetheart, had been married for thirty-seven years. Three children, a boy and two girls, all upstanding citizens without so much as a parking ticket.

  Unless Pults was hiding some deep secret they’d yet to uncover, he looked as clean as they come. Even so, the man’s detective agency was either failing or going through a slump. Over the past two days, Fisher had seen Pults meet with no one, nor did he leave the office for anything but lunch in the park and to go home at night. Grim’s probe into the agency’s financials showed little activity, and Pults’s personal accounts were exactly what you’d expect from a retired cop.

  The lead Grimsdottir had found for Fisher involved Peter’s last credit card purchase a week earlier at Brulerie St-Denis, a café off Chemin Rheaume. A discreet canvass of the café with Peter’s picture led to Jerry Pults, a regular customer.

  The question was, what was Pults’s connection with Peter, and had it contributed to his death?

  * * *

  After a five-minute head start, Fisher followed Pults back to his office, which was sandwiched between a Vietnamese restaurant and a Thai restaurant/Internet café in a four-story building on Rue St. Andre. Fisher popped into a gift shop across the street and browsed their selection of snow globes and watched Pults’s building until he saw Pults’s secretary, a mid-forties redhead wearing CD-sized gold hoop earrings, come out the front door and head down the street. Another creature of habit, Fisher had found. She and Pults staggered their lunch hours, same time every day.

  Fisher crossed the street, pushed through the building’s door, and took the stairs to the third floor. Pults’s office was the first door on the right; the silver-painted plastic plaque beside it read PULTS INVESTIGATIONS. Fisher turned the knob and walked through. In the back, behind a Formica-topped reception desk, a muted bell sounded.

  “Be right with ya,” Pults called.

  Fisher walked past the reception desk, turned at a copy machine/coffee room, and stood in Pults’s doorway. Pults was sitting on the edge of his desk, one sock and shoe off, clipping the toenail on his big toe. Behind Pults was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase packed to overflowing. Fisher saw some Herodotus and Plutarch, dozens of World War II
and Civil War history books, Shakespeare’s sonnets, and a compendium of Three Stooges trivia. Clearly Pults was well-read and had eclectic taste. Beside the bookcase was a five-by-seven picture of a dog, a bichon frise, Fisher guessed. It was wearing a superman costume with the word SNOWBALL emblazoned across the front.

  “Hey, hi there,” Pults said, looking up. “I’ll be right—”

  “That’s okay,” Fisher said. “This won’t take long. You had lunch with a man named Peter a couple weeks ago at Brulerie St-Denis. As far as I can tell, you were the last man to see him alive.”

  Pults squinted at Fisher for a few seconds, slipped his sock and shoe back on, then limped around his desk and plopped down in his chair. “Peter’s dead?”

  Pults looked genuinely surprised. Fisher nodded.

  “And who are you?”

  Fisher had already given his approach a lot of thought. Both his gut and Pults’s personnel file told Fisher the former RCMP detective was an honest man. If he had anything to do with Peter’s death, it was probably unintentional. Plus, Pults, being a cop, had heard a lifetime of crap from criminals trying to get over on him. Fisher’s best chance was to simply lay his cards on the table and ask for the man’s help.

  “My name is Sam. I’m Peter’s brother.”

  “Yeah? Huh. Funny, Peter never mentioned a brother.”

  “He never mentioned a private detective to me.”

  “Can you prove it?” Pults asked.

  “What’d you have in mind? An old Christmas card?”

  “You guys had a cat when you were kids. What was its name?”

  Interesting, Fisher thought. Pults’s question implied more than a simple business relationship, but a friendship.

  “Pod,” Fisher said. “Short for Tripod. He lost his right front leg in a raccoon trap in the woods behind our house. Peter found him, ran home with him, and pestered our mom till she gave in and let us keep him.”

  “And how’d he stop the bleeding?”

  “He didn’t. I did. Used the rubber tubing off my sling-shot.”

  Pults smiled, showing a gap between his front teeth the width of a nickel’s edge. “Man, I always liked that story. Tell me what happened to Peter.”

  Fisher did. After he finished, Pults was silent for a few seconds. He clasped his hands on top of his desk blotter, dipped his chin, and shook his head. “I should have gone with him. This goddamned hip…”

  “Gone where?” Fisher asked. “Start at the beginning.”

  He and Peter were business partners, Pults explained, and had been for nearly two years. He was Peter’s link to the RCMP and the Canadian underworld, which Pults knew inside and out after two decades. Peter paid him under the table and kept their relationship off the books.

  “He played his cards close to the vest,” Pults said.

  “Runs in the family.”

  “Anyway, he had a lot of big clients. When he had something for me, I’d handle it. It wasn’t often, but it was enough to keep me in salmon lures and fishing trips.”

  “Which explains your business’s low traffic.”

  “Yeah. I’ve got a decent pension, so whatever Peter tossed my way was gravy. This last thing, though, was a different animal.”

  “How so?”

  Pults opened his top desk drawer, withdrew a manila folder, and slipped a newspaper clipping from it. He handed it to Fisher, who scanned the article, which included a picture of a woman. She had long black hair, delicate cheekbones, a nose with an ever-so-slight bump in it, and flashing brown eyes. Fisher read the picture’s caption and looked up at Pults in surprise. “Carmen Hayes? You’re kidding?”

  Pults shook his head. “Price, Carmen’s father, hired Peter to find her.”

  Four months earlier, the twenty-eight-year-old daughter of Price Hayes had disappeared on a trip to Montreal. While Price Hayes was infamous — a colorful and crotchety old-money Texas oil baron with a family name as old as Sam Houston’s — his daughter, Carmen, was renowned, but only within her chosen field, hydrogeology, the study of how fluid moves through and affects rock. Since graduating from college, Carmen had worked in the exploration division of her father’s company.

  According to Price Hayes, his daughter had responded to a corporate headhunter’s invitation to meet with the CEO of Akono Oil, a Japanese firm specializing in deep-water petroleum exploration and extraction. The day after arriving in Montreal, Carmen disappeared. Through its general counsel, Akono Oil claimed it never extended such an offer to Carmen, and none of its corporate staff had been in Montreal during that time.

  Both the FBI and the RCMP had worked the case with fervor, turning over every rock and every lead, large and small, but to no avail. No sign of Carmen could be found. Her trail ended the moment she stepped out of her hotel that morning. For the first month after her disappearance, the mystery of Carmen Hayes had been a regular on every cable news channel and tabloid show.

  “Mr. Hayes had pushed and rousted every government official he could get on the phone on either side of the border,” Pults said. “But there was nothing they could do. Before he hired Peter, Price had gone through three other private investigators, some of the biggest and best in the business.”

  “How long had Peter been on it?”

  “About a month.”

  “And?”

  “And I think he had something. He didn’t share much with me, and that had me worried. He said it was for my own good. He was looking at a man named Aldric Legard.”

  “I’ve heard the name,” Fisher said. “Quebec Mafia.”

  “Right. A brutal son of a bitch. Was the number two man until one night five or six years ago. He and the boss are sitting down to a nice dinner of potage aux pois chiches. The boss had a spoonful of it halfway to his mouth when Legard jammed a stiletto into his eye. Boss goes headfirst into the potage, Legard keeps eating. Piece of cake.”

  “That’ll put you off your soup,” Fisher said.

  “And then some. So, Legard moves to number one and starts shaking up the business. The old boss was into contracts, unions, high-end escort services, and so on. Legard ditches all that and starts up with heroin, coke, and white slavery.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “White girls, late teens or early twenties, mostly blondes, shipped over to Indonesia and the Middle East for stripping or sex — or both. Legard has quite a customer base. He even takes requests: height, weight, eye color… you know. Legard’s also—”

  “How many?” Fisher said.

  “Girls?” Pults shrugged. “Who can say? Most of them live off the grid. They disappear, and no one notices except their friends — who rarely report anything, given the way they feel about police. If I had to guess at a number, though… Well into the hundreds.”

  “Christ,” Fisher said. “What else?”

  “Legard’s also elbow deep in Ottawa. He’s on a first name basis with half the House of Commons. Just a rumor, of course, but it would explain why he’s not locked up in some hole somewhere.”

  “So Peter thought Legard had snatched Carmen Hayes?”

  “That’s my guess, but she doesn’t fit the profile: brunette, closer to thirty than twenty. Most of Legard’s acquisitions are runaways or street kids. I think Peter figured Legard had been contracted to snatch Carmen and deliver her somewhere for someone. Not a regular customer. If you want someone kidnapped, why not go to someone who’s done it a lot?”

  This was an unexpected turn, Fisher thought. He’d never had the slightest inkling Peter had been involved in the Hayes kidnapping. How did an oil baron’s missing daughter, a Canadian crime boss, and white slavery tie into PuH-19 and Peter’s death?

  Fisher said, “Okay, so Peter asked you to do a background check on Legard…”

  “Yeah, he was looking for a way in — a corner he could peel back. He never told me how he got interested in Legard, but the theory was that if Legard had snatched Carmen, she’d probably gone down the same pipeline Legard uses for his other girls.”<
br />
  “You told me you should have gone with him,” Fisher said. “What did you mean? Someplace specific?”

  “One of Legard’s front companies is called Terrebonne Exports. Fish canning and export. He’s got a fair-size fleet and warehouses all along the St. Lawrence Seaway and on Nova Scotia. Peter thought Legard was using his ships to smuggle the girls overseas.”

  This made sense. There was a reason why ships and ports were the preferred venue for smugglers, terrorists, and sundry criminals. Ports were virtually impossible to fully secure, and ships were, by their very nature, a warren of nooks and crannies tailor-made for hiding contraband, inanimate and human alike.

  The question was, did he follow what was likely Peter’s course and look at Legard’s warehouses, or did he go to Legard himself and ask — not so nicely — what had happened to Peter and why?

  The truth was, Fisher had made up his mind before he even asked the question.

  8

  SAINT-SULPICE, QUEBEC, CANADA

  Fisher heard a muted squelch as the subdermal receiver implanted beneath the skin behind his ear came to life. Then, a few seconds later, Grim’s voice: “Do you read me, Sam?”

  Fisher lowered his binoculars and shimmied backward, deeper into the underbrush. The night was chilly, hovering at fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and a low mist clung to the ground. Overhead he could hear the occasional pinging screech of bats hunting the darkened treetops for insects.

  Before him lay a half-mile stretch of the St. Lawrence River and beyond that, the village of Saint-Sulpice and, on its outskirts, Aldric Legard’s estate, a sprawling three hundred thousand square-foot French country mansion set on ten acres of rock elm and white oak.

  The approach Fisher had chosen seemed tailor-made for him. This section of the St. Lawrence was bisected by Iles de Boucherville, a series of narrow, tree-covered islands that ran parallel to both shorelines and were uninhabited save the dozens of strobe-topped navigation towers designed to warn off passing ships. Lined with hundreds of tiny coves and inlets, the islands appealed to the SEAL in Fisher as not only the perfect insertion point but also the perfect E&E (escape and evasion) route. If he ran into trouble and had to retreat under pursuit, the islands’ geography would work to his advantage.